THE NEW WINE
195
hoc
signo
vinces
Non
timendum
est
Veritate
duce . "
In order
to
cut a long story short , it
may
be as
sumed
that
so-called
modern
philosophy
finds
its
founder
in
the French philosopher Descartes
;
for
it
was
he
who started
to
unravel
the
Penelope
web
of
tangled
philosophic thought
,
which had lain
sleeping
for
a
thousand
years
or
more
upon
the sterile shelf
of
Christian impotence
.
His theories
of
“
Innate
ideas
”
raised
the anger of
Locke
,
the disciple
of
Aristotle and
Bacon
.
Revolting
from the
cogito ergo sum
of
Descartes
,
he
compared
the
mind
to
a
tabula
rasa
,
on which
he
in
his turn
wrote
an
equal
absurdity
in
the words
:
nihil
est
in
intellectu
quod non antea fuerit
in
sensu
.
Leibnitz
in
his day
,
perceiving
the
weakness
in
this
axiom
,
ex
tended
its
phraseology
,
but
in
no
way
its
meaning
,
by
adding Excipi nisi ipse intellectus
.
This weakness
in
Locke's
system
became
only too
apparent
to
his
followers
;
and
Berkeley
,
as
well
as
Hume
,
and
later
still
Kant
himself
,
travelling
by
slightly
different
roads
,
ultimately
arrived
at
the
same
destination
:
we
cannot
go
beyond
experience
.”
In
the first half
of
the last
century
Kant's
immedi
ate successors
,
such
as
Fichte
,
Schelling
and
Hegel
,
swinging round this central point
of
attraction
,
though
viewing
it
from
different
positions
,
ultimately
,
like
moths
round
a
candle
,
fell spluttering into the socket
,
burnt
by
that
same
flame
they
were
attempting
to
explain
away
.
Nevertheless
,
though
at
first
their
Narcissus
-
like self
-
worship
may
seem
to
have
been
productive
of
little
good
,
at
least
,
however
,
it
has
brought
to
blossom
one irrefragable and
irrefutable
fact
,
and that
is
:
that
in
some
apparently
unknown